The Consequences of Global Disasters

Anthony Elliott, Eric Hsu

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138861152
• eBook ISBN: 9781317505877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Disasters of the 21st century differ substantially from other kinds of hazards that previous societies have had to cope with because of the twin forces of globalization and the communications revolution. But what makes today's disasters—industrial, technological, environmental, and socio-cultural—so different in scope and impact? What are the possible disasters of the future? And how can we, as collective humanity, best manage and respond to the globalization of disasters?

The Consequences of Global Disasters makes a distinctive contribution to the ever-expanding field of disaster research by developing a multi-contextual, multi-disciplinary and multi-methodological approach to the social analysis of disasters. Anthony Elliott and Eric L. Hsu have brought together a highly distinguished group of international contributors to focus on how people react to the unsettling effects of disasters, which come in a multitude of forms. Numerous contributors concentrate on the cultural, political and psychological ramifications of the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami, but disasters in other contexts, such as Australia, China and Haiti, are considered as well.

By offering unique empirical, methodological and theoretical insights, The Consequences of Global Disasters sets an agenda for future developments in the field of disaster research and will be a key resource for students and scholars working in social science disciplines such as sociology, cultural studies, international relations, psycho-social studies, social work, Japanese studies and social theory.

Part I

Expanding forms of disaster research

1

Broadening horizons of disaster research

Eric L. Hsu and Anthony Elliott

Global emergencies, disasters and catastrophes, it would seem, have colonized much of the early 21st century. In December 2004, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake erupted on the Pacific sea floor near the Indonesian island of Sumatra. This, in turn, gave rise to a tsunami that severely impacted the shorelines of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and the Maldives – with a death toll of around 350,000 people (Athukorala & Resosudarmo, 2005). In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina – one of the most deadly and costliest hurricanes to ravage the Gulf Coast of America – killed more than 1,300 people and displaced over 200,000 persons to evacuation centers (Rodríguez & Aguirre, 2006). In April 2008, Cyclone Nargis destroyed large sections of Sri Lanka and Burma, in which 140,000 people died or went missing (Stone, 2009). In 2010, a devastating earthquake shook Haiti, killing 230,000 people and displacing roughly 1.5 million from their homes (Bilham, 2010). The list of earthquakes, tsunamis, storms, landslides and floods in the ever-evolving hazardous landscape of the 21st century goes on, and from one angle represents a line of continuity with regard to natural phenomena throughout the centuries threatening peoples and societies on planet Earth.

However, there is more – much more – when considering the consequences of disaster in these early years of the 21st century. For one thing, the social, cultural and political dimensions of disasters have become all the more apparent, as it is no longer apt to regard disasters as being merely ‘natural’ (Weichselgartner, 2001; Quarantelli, 1989). Disasters now also have global reach. To a seemingly ever-increasing degree, disasters integrate national societies and economic regions into transnational networks through information communication technology, trade, transport and travel, and much else – as analyzed in some parts of this book.

Let us consider, for a minute, the wider frame of disasters that have threatened whole societies and their economic and social progress in the 21st century. The 2000s began, as the previous century had ended, with the European BSE crisis (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, more commonly known as ‘mad cow disease’) dominating media coverage and the wider public sphere (Washer, 2006). This fatal cow disease spread to humans through consumption of tainted meat, with thousands of people around the world having died from having eaten infected cattle. On 11 September 2001, terrorist group al-Qaeda flew passenger airlines into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, resulting in the deaths of approximately 3,000 people (according to the Global Terrorism Database). In 2007, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Global Financial Crisis, crashed stock markets worldwide, and led to the collapse of some of the largest financial institutions (especially in the United States) and the plummeting of real estate prices (Holton, 2012). In 2010, the biggest accidental oil spill ever occurred off the Gulf of Mexico after drilling by the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon rig triggered a methane gas explosion. It was estimated that 5 million barrels of oil were spilt (McNutt, Camilli & Crone, 2012), with the environmental and long-term health implications largely immeasurable. Health disasters, terrorist disasters, financial disasters and environmental disasters: our present global order consists of an ever-widening terrain of the disaster landscape, one that reconfigures the ‘natural’ as socio-cultural as possibly never before. As with the previous detailing of so-called ‘natural’ disasters, this inventory of 21st-century human-produced catastrophes is limited and partial, but what is important about this short inventory, nonetheless, is that it captures something of the changing disaster landscape affecting our global world. Advanced technological development makes trade, travel, tourism, terrorism and many other features of the contemporary world increasingly interconnected and thus much more complex and consequently more hazardous. Increasing globalization reconstitutes disasters so far within the parameters of uncertainty that risks, responsibilities and consequences cannot always be calculated with any degree of precision. Hence, this is why it makes sense to speak of the disaster landscape in the 21st century as being a ‘new ball game’ (De Smet, Lagadec & Leyson, 2012), where ‘mega-crises’ loom large and threaten to up-end many established ways of life across the world (Helsloot, Boin, Jacobs & Comfort, 2012).

It is with this in mind that The Consequences of Global Disasters is designed as a provocative intervention. On one level, the work is intended to highlight how disasters can be ‘global’, although, in using this term, we are careful to emphasize that ‘global’ does not mean universal or uniform. Rather, as much scholarly work has shown, it is better to conceive ‘global’ as a manifold concept (e.g. Lemert, Elliott, Chaffee & Hsu, 2010; Hsu, 2014). One of the key insights to develop out of the scholarly debate surrounding globalization is that the phenomenon involves many different scales of analysis. The global does not mean that the concept of the local has been rendered obsolete (Robertson, 1995). In fact, quite the opposite. It is only through the prism of the local that the global has any meaning and vice versa. This informs what we mean when we say that disasters can be ‘global’. Studying a disaster in one part of the world does not mean it necessarily is entirely applicable to other contexts (e.g. Mileti, 1987). However, it is equally the case that disasters based primarily in one locale or set of locales can have far-reaching implications. The point of this work is to further articulate and explore this dynamic.

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, we explain the relevance and pressing need for further social scientific research to be undertaken on the topic of disasters. Disasters, as we spell out, should not be studied only by a narrow band of specialists within certain social scientific disciplines. This is because disasters have bearing on many, if not almost all, aspects of social life. We also sketch out how the disasters that people face in the 21st century are to some extent unique and how this presents new challenges to the ways disasters are studied. Our second aim in this chapter is to situate the contributions that are made in this volume within the broader context of the disaster research field. The chapters that follow can be organized along three main thematic lines. The first explores how the boundaries of disaster research can be broadened. This does not just involve undertaking more research that bears on the topic of disasters across different social contexts. It also involves articulating new kinds of disaster research, conceptually, geographically and methodologically. A second way that the chapters in this volume further advance the field of disaster research is by framing disasters as a prism from which to understand social differences and asymmetrical power relations (e.g. Reid, 2013). Disasters have the potential to reveal how ethnicity, class and gender are expressed, as they reflect and refract various social variables. The third and final theme we draw from chapters in this volume is the way in which disasters penetrate all the way down into the personal and psychological aspects of social life. Disasters are not just phenomena that have unsettling social structural effects. They also affect how subjectivities are constituted and reproduced. In the last part of the chapter, we conclude by briefly reflecting on the ‘messiness’ and future frontiers of disaster research.

The social significance of disasters

Why study disasters? This is a simple but complex question. It is simple in the sense that it can be answered in a rather straightforward fashion: because social disruptions in the form of disasters can dramatically affect how people live their lives. However, the question is also complex in that there are innumerable ways to articulate how this is so.

Since its inception in the 1940s and 1950s, the field of disaster studies in the social sciences has made significant strides in revealing the manifold ways in which disasters are a constitutive component of the social world (e.g. Drabek, 1986; Tierney, 2007; Rodríguez, Quarantelli & Dynes, 2007). One of the key theoretical precepts for this area of study is that disasters are social phenomena (Perry, 2007). ‘Disasters’, according to Anthony Oliver-Smith (1996: 303), ‘occur at the interface of society, technology and environment and are fundamentally the outcomes of the interactions of these features’. Hence, disasters cannot be taken as ‘given’, nor can they be understood without some social referent. This is true of how they are defined and correspondingly of the impacts with which they are associated. For example, it has been argued that disasters are events that do not always materialize, as merely being perceived as a threat to the social order is socially consequential (Cisin & Clark, 1962; Drabek, 1986).

In recent decades, disaster research has been advanced on a number of fronts. Empirically, scholarly work has moved away from studying disasters in a very limited number of social contexts. Whereas early research on disasters tended to be situated in the United States and Europe (Tierney, 2007; Rodríguez et al., 2007), there is a growing body of research that is interested in studying disasters elsewhere – although research has still been sparse in some geographic areas. The type of disasters that have been studied has also widened. During its earlier years, sociological research on disasters in the United States tended to be focused on a limited set of issues ‘that were of concern to government and military leaders, centering mainly on potential public responses in the event of a nuclear war’ (Tierney, 2007: 504). However, disaster research has since branched out into other types of disruptive events, such as earthquakes, hurricanes and floods, and has expanded its realm of interest to encompass other research priorities.

Empirical advances in disaster research have been informed by – as well as informing of – theoretical work in the study of disasters. One particularly fruitful and recurrent line of inquiry has been to ask the question ‘What defines a disaster?’ (e.g. Quarantelli, 1998; Perry & Quarantelli, 2005; Perry, 2007). This has led to the development of a number of theoretical frameworks, which have helped to differentiate disasters from other concepts. For example, Quarantelli (2005b) has advanced a good case for why disasters ought to be thought of as distinct from catastrophes. In some respects, catastrophes can be thought of as a subset of disasters, but they differ considerably in terms of scale and intensity. Catastrophes signify that most, if not all, of a particular context has been impacted by some disruptive event, and this includes the capacities of local agencies to respond or to undertake any relief/recovery efforts (Quarantelli, 2005b; Rodríguez & Trainor, 2006: 86–87). Disasters, by contrast, are not bound by such characteristics, as they can refer to socially disruptive phenomena that are not as all-encompassing.

Interrogating the meaning of disasters has also encouraged researchers to develop multifaceted understandings of what disasters constitute. For example, one strand of disaster research finds that disasters can be uniquely captured through the prism of ‘hazards’. What is distinct about this approach is that it does not construe disruptive events as always rare or wholly unpredictable. Rather, it finds that they are ‘basic elements of environments and as constructed features of human systems’ (Oliver-Smith, 1996: 304). The hazards approach to studying disasters has been insightful, in that it has illuminated how disasters can be the result of societal actions or inactions and not just the outcome of a wholly unforeseen occurrence. However, scholars have identified some of the limitations of using hazards to investigate the significance of disasters. One of these is that it does not capture all of the types of disasters there are (Quarantelli, 2005a). It primarily captures those that are more cyclical, while partly overlooking disasters that are less so. There is also a tendency for the hazards perspective to focus on the processes of hazards that are seen to be the ‘agents’ of social disruption. One common point of criticism of this tendency is that it runs the risk of downplaying the social nature of disasters. As a corrective, scholarly work employing a hazards approach has recently shifted its attention to the issue of vulnerabilities (e.g. Cutter, 2005; Comfort, Wisner, Cutter & Pulwarty, 1999). This shift is meant to highlight the centrality of social systems in the study and analysis of disasters, since it is not the hazard agent which is ultimately the producer of vulnerabilities. Rather, vulnerabilities to disasters result and are defined by the social contexts in which they are situated (Quarantelli, 2005a). This is clear, for example, in the case of Hurricane Katrina. As some studies have shown, the associated consequences of the disaster were to a large degree determined by the various social arrangements and inequalities of New Orleans and its surrounding areas (e.g. Laska & Morrow, 2006).

Questioning the classical distinction between natural and technological/social disasters has been another major theoretical development in the field of disaster studies. While there has been a tendency in public discourse to frame some disasters as being ‘acts of God’ in contrast to those that are ‘acts of men and women’, there is a growing body of work that challenges such analytical divisions (Weichselgartner, 2001; Quarantelli, 1989). This has to do with the notion that no disasters are purely natural. Disasters that appear ‘natural’ can be precipitated – inadvertently or intentionally – by human intervention, such as the effect that deforestation has on flood occurrence by reducing water absorption capacities (Bokwa, 2013: 716). Additionally, it can be argued that completely natural disasters do not exist because it is the social element that causes them to be viewed as disasters in the first place (Quarantelli, 1989). Some recently developed accounts have also advocated for a ‘post-social’ approach to studying disasters (Williams, 2008). This involves recognizing the inadequacies of dichotomous ways of thinking about society and nature.

What these various developments speak to is the way in which the field of disaster research has grown and become a more well-established and analytically sophisticated area of study. However, at the same time this is not to say that the field does not stand at a ‘crossroads’ in some respects. Kathleen Tierney (2007) advances this line of thought. Her argument is that, within the discipline of sociology, disaster research can be thought of as marginalized. For one thing, she suggests that it lacks visibility within the mainstream (ibid.: 517). Not only are the numbers of disaster researchers (within sociology) relatively low, but also the work they produce tends to be transmitted in highly specialist outlets that are less noticeable to broad audiences. Tierney holds the tendency to focus on applied research and narrow theoretical interests as the main culprits, as much as they have developed the area of study in other ways.

Tierney offers a few suggestions about how to steer the field of disaster studie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• PART I: Expanding forms of disaster research
• PART II: Disasters and social division
• PART III: Social theory and the psycho-social dimensions of disasters
• Index